Jack knew immediately that this woman had a history. Most of her past he knew nothing about, and much of it he never would know. Inga called herself an “adventuress.” She had a courtesan’s subtle style and cunning. Inga had been born into a well-to-do Danish family in 1913, or so she said. Her father died when she was only four, and her mother seems to have seen her beautiful daughter as a vehicle for her own advancement. Inga told Jack that she had been such a natural actress that “the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen declared that I probably would be a second Pavlova.”
Instead, at the age of fifteen, with her thirty-six-inch bust, eighteen-inch waist, and thirty-five-inch hips encased in a pink Empire-style dress, she won the Miss Denmark contest. In Paris for the Miss Europe contest, sixteen-year-old Inga met a young Egyptian student and diplomat with whom she eloped. The man was rich largely in debts, and Inga employed her theatrical skills fending off creditors. She traveled with her husband to Cairo and Alexandria, where she left him and returned to Denmark.
In 1935 Inga met Paul Fejos, a film director nearly twice her age. Fejos starred her in a film shot in the Norwegian fjords. Disillusioned with filmmaking, Inga traveled to Berlin. Despite her lack of experience in journalism, she arrived in the German capital with credentials from Berlingske Tidene, the leading Danish paper.
Beauty is its own calling card, and Inga quickly gained access to the Nazi elite that any journalist would have envied. She interviewed Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goring, and Hitler himself. She attended the 1936 Berlin Olympics and on one occasion sat in Hitler’s box. The Führer gave Inga a signed photo of himself in a silver and red leather frame with the peculiar inscription: “To an indefinite Fr(au).” Hitler generally did not hand out such special photos to any but his intimates, and by any measure, it was extraordinary that Hitler gave one to Inga.
Inga married Fejos in 1936, and after leaving Germany in circumstances as mysterious as her arrival, she and her second husband journeyed to the East Indies to do some anthropological explorations. There, in remote villages, Inga said that she was worshipped as a goddess, and a primitive statue was built to replicate her blonde beauty. She left, however, because this life left her with hardly more fulfillment than the life of an actress. She arrived in New York with her mother in February 1940.
In the fall, Inga entered the Columbia University School of Journalism. She had a way of arousing both jealousy and suspicion in people, especially women. In November, one of her classmates wrote a letter to the FBI after spending an evening at Inga’s apartment, where “the conversation slid into a discussion of the large number of Jews in the class, and the danger of civil war in this country. We left very late, dazed by her charms, but with the uncomfortable feeling that we had been somehow threatened.” Her accuser said that, although she had no evidence, she believed that Inga had been set up at the school for the purpose of “influencing morale in this country for the benefit of the German government.”
Inga was doing little more than reiterating opinions she had casually picked up on the social circuit in Berlin and elsewhere. Her beauty was a magical amulet that she could use only among men. At the journalism school she may have had detractors among her classmates, but she nonetheless developed useful friendships with several professors. At the same time, although she was still married to Paul Fejos, she was carrying on an affair with Nils Blok, a Dane of artistic bent who was working for the Danish consulate. Her mother found her daughter’s behavior reprehensible and regularly berated Inga, whom she had brought up to be something more than an adulteress. She berated Inga’s lover as well, writing in her diary: “[I] lost control of myself when I saw him making love to Inga. He undoubtedly has Inga’s permission.”
Inga moved to Washington upon graduation, in part to get away from her mother’s ceaseless hectoring. She had met Arthur Krock at Columbia, where the New York Times columnist led her to believe that he was “a skirt chaser.” Krock used his formidable position to advance Inga as a candidate for a job at the Washington Times-Herald.
“I’ve got another one for you,” Krock told Frank Waldrop, the editor. “What are you, our staff procurer?” Waldrop remembered replying. Inga decided to display her abilities as a reporter by doing an interview with Axel Wenner-Gren, her husband’s employer, one of the world’s wealthiest men and a suspected Nazi spy. As she talked to the multimillionaire, she was under FBI surveillance.
Waldrop assigned Inga to write a benign, chatty column profiling the powerful and intriguing, the best possible entree to the highest ranks of the capital. Washington was a city of powerful men who fancied pretty women as one of the natural accoutrements of power. Inga had scores of admirers. In those early months in Washington, she was awakened every morning at seven-thirty by a call from Bernard Baruch, the legendary seventy-one-year-old financier. “He can help me a lot,” she wrote her mother, “but it won’t do any good for him to be so much in love.”
Inga knew that in all likelihood her future depended on powerful older men like Baruch and Krock, but she was drawn now into a liaison with Jack. Inga saw the deep complexities of the man. She saw how he could manipulate most people as easily as she could beguile men.
When they walked into parties, he lit up what he called his “BP” (big personality), charming his way across the room. And when he left, he dismissed everyone he had met. “What a drag!” he exclaimed. “What a bore!” Jack didn’t have friends. He had supplicants, lackeys, men like Torby Macdonald, whom Jack on occasion derided as little better than a stupid oaf.
When Jack arrived at Inga’s modest apartment, he whipped off his clothes, took a shower, and pranced around the living room in a towel. They made love when he wanted to make love. It did not matter if Inga had just dressed herself for a fancy party, if Jack was ready for sex, Inga had to accommodate him. “We’ve got ten minutes,” he told her. “Let’s go.”
At times Jack might have treated Inga with the same casual disregard that he did other women, but he was venturing into a deep emotional jungle where he had never gone before. Betty Coxe Spalding, Kathleen’s roommate, found it a strange, disconcerting relationship. “I think he was terribly dependent on her,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘God, it’s sort of … she’s motherly to him.’ I don’t know that he had too much physical affection from his mother, more from his father probably than their mother.”
John White, a journalist on the paper, talked to Inga about Jack and sensed her discomfort at how dependent Jack was becoming on her. She was used to older, powerful men who sheltered her from the world; now she was harboring Jack in her arms.
“She said that he began to come apart,” recalled White. “She said that Jack’s attitude was, if the girl wouldn’t go to bed, that was all right. But if she goes to bed, it was under his terms that she gets out and goes and that is it. No in between. No affection and no lasting relationship. But he wanted to hang on to Inga. It was a little embarrassing to have this uniformly successful man suddenly become groping.”
It had been unseasonably warm that December Sunday that would forever after be known as Pearl Harbor Day. The next morning everyone went back to his or her same job, but now that the war had begun, everything had changed.
At the Washington Times-Herald, one of the leading isolationist papers in America, a reporter on the paper felt that Inga might be a German spy. This was no longer a jealous suspicion but a matter of such significance as to merit an immediate meeting at the FBI, in which Inga called the allegation absurd.
Inga did not know that she already had been under surveillance and had her own file at the FBI. The agency went ahead with a full-scale investigation. Agents broke into Inga’s apartment, photographing letters and other documents. They purloined her mother’s diary and letters. They wiretapped her phones and began around-the-clock observation.
The cold blasts of paranoia played across Washington that January, and everywhere the agents looked they found strange inconsistencies. An attaché at the Danish legat
ion reported that he had never heard of Inga’s family in the circles in which she claimed acquaintance. And wasn’t it strange that Inga spoke such perfect English when she had arrived in America less than two years before? She said she didn’t know German, yet sources reported that she would occasionally utter German expressions. At one point the FBI inventoried her possessions and discovered the Hitler photo. A Nazi spy may not have been likely to be traveling with a signed photo of Hitler, but the FBI would have been foolhardy and derelict not to have thoroughly investigated Inga. It was all beginning to add up, or so it seemed. The agent in charge noted that the case had “more possibilities than anything else I have seen in a long time.”
Jack and Inga had been lovers probably no more than three weeks when their little dollhouse of romance began to come tumbling down. Jack was a navy intelligence officer bedding down with a suspected Nazi spy. If he had been a man of narrow political ambition, he would have fled from Inga. He knew that his lover was no Mata Hari, but in her fatal embrace might lie the end of his career as a naval officer as well as any future in politics.
Instead, Jack took what he considered precautions, silly little gestures like corralling a friend, John White, to accompany the couple on outings pretending that he was Inga’s date. Jack may have been an intelligence officer, but he did not notice the extensive government surveillance or the presence of two sets of detectives watching him and Inga—not only the FBI but also private detectives hired by Inga’s husband.
On January 12, 1942, Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist, carried an item blind only to the unsighted and the uninformed. The cognoscenti woke up that morning to read: “One of ex-Ambassador’s Kennedy’s eligible sons is the target of a Washington gal columnist’s affections. So much so she has consulted her barrister about divorcing her exploring groom. Pa Kennedy no like.”
“Pa Kennedy” not only did not like this situation but cringed at the potential consequences of this foolish affair. He had seen how close his affair with Gloria Swanson had come to destroying his marriage, and he could not understand why his second son couldn’t follow his father’s lead and keep his dalliances dalliances. Joe had received a telephone call from Inga’s jealous husband, an enraged, bitter man who was not going to go shuffling away into the dusk. Joe had long ago prophesied that war would mean the end of democracy, and he could surely see that if Jack did not end his affair with Inga, he might be swept away in the hysteria of a warring nation. Within twenty-four hours after the Winchell column, Jack found himself reassigned to the navy base at Charleston, South Carolina.
Jack spent his last three nights in Washington in Inga’s apartment. He could have gorged himself on her womanly charms before heading off satiated, ready to move on and to forget. Inga, though, was not just another fitful affair, and his very first weekend in Charleston she took the train down to South Carolina to spend more time alone with her lover.
Inga saw into Jack as no one else had—the light and the darkness, the glory and the doom, the nascent idealism and the desperate cynicism. She was lifetimes older. She talked and wrote to him as if he were all youth and future and hope.
“He is full of enthusiasm and expectations, eager to make his life a success,” Inga wrote him, as if they were exploring a separate person together. “He wants the fame, the money—and what rarely goes with fame—happiness…. There is determination in his green Irish eyes. He has two backbones: His own and his father’s.”
Inga saw the depth of Jack’s ambition. He was not his brother’s pale shadow, but a man who weighed the cost of aspiration with an appraiser’s cautious eye. Inga spied two pathways before Jack. She called one direction “the West,” though it was not a direction but many directions, not a mere road but endless space.
Out this way a man lived as he wanted to live. Here there was room for a woman like Inga, whose past disappeared in the openness, room for babies, laughter, and adventures that had no beginning and no end. Then there was that tortured road to power, twisting through the salons of Georgetown and the corridors of influence, a narrow, lonely road that ended at the White House.
Inga believed that her Jack could journey up both roads, and she implored him to keep both dreams alive. “You are going away,” she wrote him. “And more important than returning with your handsome body intact … come back with the wish both to be a White-House-man and wanting the ranch—somewhere out west.”
As much as Jack might want to journey up both roads, Inga knew that most successful men chose only one road. “Put a match to the smoldering ambition, and you will go like wild fire,” she implored him. “It is all against the ranch out west, but it is the unequalled highway to the White House. And if you can find something you really believe in, then my dear you caught the biggest fish in the ocean. You can pull it aboard, but don’t rush in, there is still time. Nonsense? Maybe badly expressed, but it is right, perfect and powerful like Young Kennedy in person.” She saw that if he could only reach out and find the ideals that gleamed out there on the horizon, then he might indeed have both power and principle, great accomplishment and noble ends.
Inga was daring Jack to break out of his prison of intellect, forgoing his dependence solely on calculation and rationality. “Maybe your gravest mistake, handsome … is that you admire brains more than heart,” she wrote him, “but then that is necessary to arrive in the end so that Jack could prove that he was indeed ‘a man of the future.’”
When Jack and Inga met or talked on the telephone, he savagely rebuked the world in which he found himself. He wrote Inga condemning the excesses of “stinking New Dealism.” His stint in Washington had convinced him that the city was a political brothel. He despaired at the boastful headline screaming victory above a story that “stinks of defeat.”
Jack believed, like his father, that the war “may call for us to be regimented to the point that make the Nazis look like starry-eyed individualists.” He had a Puritan’s rage at the triviality of politics and the pathetic self-interest of people chasing pensions, not Nazis. He despaired even at himself and people like him who were thinking gloomy thoughts and “writing gloomy letters” instead of fighting the war that had to be fought.
One of the persistent themes of Jack’s life was the natural lethargy of democracy. He believed that most citizens, if they had heard Paul Revere’s clarion call in the night, would merely have turned over and gone back to sleep. It took fires in the night lapping against the very foundation of their homes to wake up the citizens of a democracy and send them out into the street to attack the forces that would destroy them.
Jack had seen it in England, and now he saw the same thing again in Washington and Charleston. In the nation’s capital, the politicians and bureaucrats and reporters trafficked in the trivial while, as he wrote Lem, “all around us are examples of inefficiency that may lick us—Nero had better move over as there are a lot of fiddlers to join him.”
As he sat in Charleston perusing the newspapers, he felt that “Washington is begginning [sic] to look more and more like the Cuban Tea Room on a Saturday night with the Madame out.” Jack, like his father, looked down with despairing eyes on the world in which he lived. He, however, could also look up and proclaim, “The reason we’re not witnessing a true tragedy is that we can do something that the Greeks couldn’t, we can prevent the gloomy ending.” Here then was the potential greatness of young Kennedy. Jack looked at humankind in all its frailties, weaknesses, and self-interests, shirking from none of the darkness, but then looked up and saw what might be.
At the same time Jack looked up from his cynical disregard for the female sex and conferred on Inga a passion that was as much emotional as physical. If love is emotional idealism, Jack bestowed that on her, in deed if not in word. She constantly showered her lover with verbal roses: “Honey,” “Darling,” “Honeysuckle,” “Honey Child Wilder.” She called him all these names and more. She proclaimed to Jack, “I love you.” He said nothing in return but sidled silently away from suc
h professions. He may not have been demonstrative, but he told Inga that he had talked to the Church, presumably about the possibility of marrying a twice-divorced woman.
For all the hours that the FBI recorded their conversations over the telephone or in hotel rooms, not once did Jack mention Rosemary and her terrible fate. He did not talk of his own physical pain and how he hid that from the world. He did not explore the complicated relationships with his father, mother, or Joe Jr. This was the deepest love affair of Jack’s twenty-four years, but even in bed with Inga in their most intimate moments, he kept a distance from her, harboring his deep concerns like keys to an inner life that no one would ever see.
As tightly as Jack guarded his own psyche, he was astute about human beings and their motivations. He may well have sensed that within the layers of Inga’s complexity lay ample room for carnal duplicities. During the first weekend in February that she took the train down to Charleston, the FBI reported that she and Jack “engag[ed] in sexual intercourse on numerous occasions.” When she returned to Washington, she invited Nils, her former lover, to Washington; he would come only if she would “go to bed with him.” Inga told him that though she didn’t “want to sleep with a dozen men at one time,” she would “be with him.”
When Inga talked about her fear that she might be pregnant and her desire to get an immediate annulment, Jack remained silent, the loudest possible message. Jack’s father called and talked to his son about the affair. Inga blamed Jack’s father for injecting himself into their pure, perfect love.
She wrote him later: “If I were but 18 summers, I would fight like a tigress for her young, in order to get you and keep you.” She was not only four years older and twice married, but she was carrying on affairs with two different men. Joe was right in prophesying disaster if Jack did not back away from Inga. Whatever he said to his son, whether it was the logic of his words, the sheer emotional brutality of his revelations, or the strength of his threats, it was enough for Jack.
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